Earnest Engineer

Here is a glossary of terms useful in Healthcare and Health Informatics ACO (Accountable Care Organization) MEDICARE’s outcomes-based contracting approach Arden Syntax an approach to specifying medical knowledge and clinical decision support rules in a form that is independent of any EHR and thus sharable across hospitals ARRA (American Recovery and Reconstruction Act) the Obama administration’s 2009 economic stimulus bill Blue Button an ASCII text based standard for heath information sharing first introduced by the Veteran’s Administration to facilitate access to records stored in VistA by their patients. The newer Blue Button + format provides both human and machine readable formats. CCD (Continuity of Care Document) an XML-based patient summary based on the CDA architecture CCOW (Clinical Context Object Workshop) an HL7 standard for synchronizing and coordinating applications to automatically follow the patient, user (and other) contexts to allow the clinical u...

There is a discussion draft  of a house bill called the ‘‘Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act’’. This would relieve a victim of "persistent unauthorized intrusion of the individual entity’s computer" from the risk of prosecution for using active defense measures against the intruder. This is an interesting new ground it seems. I think efforts like this, "hacking back" were often considered cowboy moves, discussed on in sotto voce, since it was not an "authorized" strategy. This article on the proposal  discusses the potential hazards of the law and using hacking back as a tool for cyber defense. While it is good to see attention being paid to cybersecurity in law, there needs to be an intelligent debate and a resulting well-crafted law which helps to define sensible boundaries. Think of areas where "hacking back" could simply be used as a defense for what was actually an offensive maneuver for instance. If you have experience and knowledge applica...